Crowd-Sourcing a Way to Sustainable Urban Logistics: What Factors Influence Enterprises’ Willingness to Implement Crowd Logistics?

Hou Bin,Li Jiang,Huanfang Wang,Feng Zhao,Guojie Xie,Lijuan Huang,Ruidong Zhu

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3044921

Abstract

The sharing economy has brought new opportunities to the logistics industry, which has created an emerging trend known as crowd logistics. Implementing this mode offers a basis for more sustainable urban logistics, but there is limited research on what leads enterprises to adopt crowd logistics. Based on the technology-organization-environment (TOE) theoretical model, this paper developed a model to study the influencing factors of enterprises’ willingness to implement crowd logistics. The data were collected through questionnaire surveys, SPSS and AMOS were used for data analysis. The empirical results showed that the relative advantage, absorptive capacity, market environment, and external motivations have significant positive impact on the company’s willingness to implement crowd logistics, while complexity and resources have no significant impact. Crowd logistics offers an important route to more sustainable urban logistics. Logistics enterprises should take measured steps when implementing crowd logistics, improve their absorptive capacity, and take necessary precautions towards minimizing the risks of crowd logistics.

Highlights

Crowd logistics has emerged as a result of the rapid growth in internet users, the extensive construction of collaborative network communities, and growing consumer awareness
The results show that factor analysis produces neither a single factor nor one general factor that could explain the majority of the variance (>40%) [69], [70], which suggests that the common method bias (CMB) is not a problem for this study
3) FINDINGS This paper finds that relative advantage, absorptive capacity, market environment, and external motivation have significant effects on the willingness of enterprises to implement crowd logistics, while complexity and resources are the opposite

Summary

Introduction

Crowd logistics has emerged as a result of the rapid growth in internet users, the extensive construction of collaborative network communities, and growing consumer awareness. These factors have facilitated the emergence of the sharing economy, which has a number of new business modes [1]. Crowd logistics refers to the outsourcing of goods distribution by enterprises (or retailers), with the use of the internet as platform, into public groups that are not fixed, have free time, and have transportation resources [2]. The tournament-based crowd logistics, which appears at the end of the value chain, focus on the flow and storage of tangible goods [4]. The two types of crowd logistics are different, both reflect the concept of the sharing economy in the logistics industry

Methods

Results

Conclusion